Flight Security

Administration Considers Ways to Cut Terror Risk From Small Planes

By MATTHEW L. WALD and ELIZABETH BECKER

Published: January 9, 2002

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 — In response to last weekend's suicide crash by a teenage pilot into a Florida skyscraper, the Office of Homeland Security has been discussing more urgently ways to reduce the terrorism risk from small planes. But officials are still groping for a way to control the sprawling general aviation system.

The measures under consideration include banning flights made outside the supervision of an air traffic controller, a change that would ban most flights by small planes; increasing scrutiny of pilots, passengers and aircraft at the airports that handle flights other than scheduled airline and military flights; and putting more of the sky off-limits and launching fighter planes to enforce the restriction.

One official said the most far- reaching steps were the least likely to be adopted.

But short of grounding most private planes, the government's air defense system is unable to prevent another suicide flight like that of Charles J. Bishop, 15 who crashed a plane into a Tampa, Fla., skyscraper last weekend, according to aviation security experts.

The Federal Aviation Administration is incapable of monitoring the more than half a million private pilots flying more than 200,000 airplanes from 18,000 airports all over the country, much less stopping these small planes from making attacks.

Since last weekend's crash, Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, has continued discussions with other government officials begun after Sept. 11 on how to bring private airplanes under better control.

The government last month abandoned most of the restrictions imposed after the terrorist attacks, when every airport in the country was temporarily shut. Now only three small airports in the Washington area remain closed. But the aviation administration has imposed several changes, including closer coordination with the Department of Defense and the imposition of temporary flight restrictions.

"No decisions have been made since this weekend's events on improving aviation security, but every time an event like Tampa occurs we learn more and include that information in our discussions," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the Homeland Security Office.

Aviation administration officials held a meeting on Monday with groups representing private airplane pilots and owners to discuss some of the measures being considered, Mr. Johndroe said.

"Until now there have been two options — pray it won't happen or ground the whole fleet," said Stephen E. Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "The serious challenge is to do a hard-nosed assessment of what are the risks and what price we are willing to pay to reduce the risks."

In a report to Congress last month, the aviation administration warned that "given the ubiquity of general aviation aircraft and airports, such aircraft are never far from major urban centers, critical infrastructure and other targets." A more detailed, classified report to be given to Congress, should be finished in about a month, according to officials. They would provide no details about its contents.

The plane that hit the Bank of America tower in Tampa on Saturday was in the air for a short time, far too little time for the air defense system to react.

Indeed, one certainty is that the answer will not rely on a large military presence in the skies. Defense officials say they have already stretched their resources to fly round-the-clock patrols over New York and Washington as well as irregular missions over other metropolitan areas.

"We're going to remain the last resort after every option has failed," said Maj. Barry Venable of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. "We weren't built for this mission."

Arguing against new restrictions are the people who own and fly private aircraft. Through their private pilots' association, they have been lobbying against any new restrictions on their freedom to fly in the United States. They point out that a temporary ban on flights within 10 miles of nuclear plants shut down nearly 50 general aviation airports nationwide.

Before Sept. 11, there was little concern about unauthorized use of private airplanes. Last year, of the 226,000 private aircraft in the United States 15 were stolen.

Most of those thefts were by drug smugglers, said Warren Morningstar, a spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a lobbying group. "They go south, get loaded up, come back and are abandoned," Mr. Morningstar said.

Since the terrorist attacks, security has tightened at general aviation terminals housed at airports that also serve airlines. For the first time, many of these terminals are requiring ground personnel to wear identification badges and pilots to be escorted to their aircraft.

For their part, private companies renting aircraft or teaching flying have been doing more thorough background checks.

But the biggest problem is keeping track of all of the private planes in the sky. Requiring all private planes to file under the direction of air traffic controllers would be one way to address that problem. But experts said that would overwhelm the air traffic control system.

The aviation administration's air traffic controllers track fewer than half the planes in flight, and technology does not allow them to track many more.

Nearly all the planes that are tracked, including all scheduled airliners, fly under instrument flight rules that require the planes to broadcast an identity number over their radios.

But that system is overburdened. The ID number, called a beacon code, consists of four digits and uses only the numbers 0 through 7. That means there is a theoretical maximum of only 2,401 numbers for the planes. In fact, there are fewer, because some are reserved for special purposes.

On a typical weekday, there are 5,000 planes in the sky under instrument flight rules. The aviation administration uses some of the identification numbers twice for flights in widely different geographic areas.

An even larger number of airplanes, no one is sure how many, fly under visual flight rules. That means they can mostly fly without individual identification numbers and are not required to file flight plans.

If the government decided to require airplanes to fly under instrument rules, that would overwhelm the aviation administration, experts said.

Many private pilots are not trained for this, and their planes do not carry the necessary equipment.

Some pilots flying under visual rules may file flight plans, but they are little more than records of origins and intended destinations.

All the proposed changes, however, would fail to deter a suicidal pilot, according to Mr. Morningstar, who pointed to lapses by the Air Force and commercial airline companies in detecting suicidal pilots.

On April 2, 1997, a 32-year-old Air Force captain flying an A-10 Thunderbolt on a training mission in Arizona broke away from his three- plane formation and flew 800 miles before crashing into a mountainside in Colorado; a subsequent investigation said that was suicide. On Oct. 31, 1999, a relief co-pilot for EgyptAir put a Boeing 767 into a dive into the Altantic that killed all 217 people on board; American investigators said that was a suicide.

Mr. Morningstar said that there were about 19 suicides in the last 20 years in general aviation planes.